Okay, so, things are hectic at Murketing headquarters right now, as the team of monkeys (by which I mean me and me alone) struggles to finish a particular project. Even so, this can’t wait: A tossing-of-Zizou T.
High Snobiety says this is from a sneaker/streetwear boutique in Switzerland, called Pulp68. The red card has been altered into what I assume is the store’s logo, since it has a 68 on it. It is, of course, a limited-edition item. See the High Snobiety entry for further details (including close-up pictures). I’m pretty sure they’ve got his age wrong, and can increase the production run by three shirts, should they choose.
An essay in the New York Review of Books by Freeman J. Dyson, reviewing a book called Breaking The Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, by Daniel C. Dennet, has some interesting passages in relation to the recent post here on varieties of belief:
Dennett … observes that belief, which means accepting certain doctrines as true, is different from belief in belief, which means believing belief in the same doctrines to be desirable. He finds evidence that large numbers of people who identify themselves as religious believers do not in fact believe the doctrines of their religions but only believe in belief as a desirable goal. The phenomenon of “belief in belief” makes religion attractive to many people who would otherwise be hard to convert. To belong to a religion, you do not have to believe. You only have to want to believe, or perhaps you only have to pretend to believe. Belief is difficult, but belief in belief is easy. Belief in belief is one of the important phenomena that give a religion increased transmissibility and consequently increased fitness….
Dennett has an easy time poking fun at the modern evangelical mega-churches which pay more attention to the size of their congregations than to the quality of their religious life. The leaders of these churches are selling their versions of religion in a competitive market, and those that have the best marketing skills prevail. The market favors practical convenience rather than serious commitment to a pure and holy life…
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Believing by Rob Walker on July 11, 2006
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Everybody loves Virginia Heffernan, even me. The Times has her blogging now, and she has a great post about the thing that’s been Topic A (who used to say that?) around Murketing HQ: The Zizou head butt. Do not miss this exquisite time-wasting “game.” Or VH’s comments.
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Pleasing by Rob Walker on July 11, 2006
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An interesting find by Josh Spear: This artist, Gautum Rao, does oil paintings of Apple products (among other things), and I guess sells them on eBay. More of Rao’s “Mac Paintings” here.
Looking at them immediately made me think of Dave White, who is most famous for doing paintings of sneakers. (Although he paints other things too — like Stormtroopers from Star Wars, for instance.) A lengthy Sneaker Freaker interview with Dave White, including lots of images, is here.
On the ever-popular topic of whether mass culture is dead, consult the most recent (July 10 & 17, 2006) issue of The New Yorker. Two features are of interest: One about Hot 97, the other about “blue collar” comedians.
Hot 97 is the New York rap station that’s become notorious as the site of several shooting incidents. According the article (by Ben McGrath), Hot 97 was the first station in the U.S. to go with to an all-hip-hop format, back in 1992. That was a long time ago, and throughout the piece there are glimpses of and allusions to something we have all come to take for granted since then: Hip-hop’s enormous cultural reach and influence. If you doubt that Jay-Z is mass, note that his supposed offense at the remarks of a Cristal executive in The Economist “generated international news.” McGrath’s article, which is really good, is not about the relationship of hip-hop to mass culture, but let’s just acknowledge: hip-hop is mainstream.
The “blue collar” comedians are Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy and a couple of others. The piece is by Tad Friend, and it’s also very good. (Friend is one of my favorite magazine writers.) The general theme is that these guys are hugely successful in a way that basically freaks out the people who run the entertainment business. If those people thought about it, Friend suggests, they might “have to confront the idea that there are indeed two Americas, and that theirs – the isolate island states of Manhattan and Hollywood – is wildly out of step with the rest of the country.” For instance, Foxworthy has sold 15 million comedy albums, “more than twice as many as Steve Martin and Richard Pryor combined.” Larry the Cable Guy’s catch-phrase, Git-R-Done, “is the most profitable phrase in comedy,” Friend writes. “Last year, the comedian sold more than seven million dollars worth of novelty merchandise in convenience stores alone.” Clearly, the Blue Collar Guys are mainstream.
Neither of those articles is online, unfortunately. The Hot 97 article is online; the Blue Collar one isn’t. (My mistake on this — thanks Steve Portigal.) Here, from the same issue, is John Cassidy’s review of The Long Tail. I haven’t read the book, so I’m not passing judgment on it one way or the other, but Cassidy generally takes issue with its contention that mass culture is, in fact, over, and that we’re headed to an all-niche world. Cassidy argues that people will continue to swarm around event movies like The Da Vinci Code, whatever the reviews or word-of-mouth are like, so they can “feel part of a social event.”
I tend to think that that’s true. I think it’s impossible to deny that the world is niche-ier than ever, I just I don’t think a lot of niches necessarily mean that mass over. To me, this issue of The New Yorker suggests that the mainstream has multiplied. I don’t think there are two Americas, I think there are more. I think there are probably four or five versions of “the mainstream” now, each of which could and should be characterized as “mass.” Mass, after all, doesn’t have to mean every single person in the country – it just has to mean big enough to feel, you know, really big.
Doesn’t hip-hop America feel really big? How about “blue collar” America (meaning the audience for those comedians, not actual blue-collar workers)? Can you deny that either one is mass? And yet, how much overlap is there between members of these two mass cultures? I also think you could make a case for a sort of Rick Warren/“Passion of the Christ” mainstream, and maybe an “alternative” America, and possibly a (smaller, but still big enough to be mass) jet-set or cosmopolitan or maybe post-national America. Maybe each overlaps with some of the others. Each of these can probably be divided into a bunch of niches, but that doesn’t cancel out the mass part of the equation.
I’m just winging it here, you understand, but basically I think the niche vs. mass debate is phony. It’s built on a false choice. There have always been niche cultures, that didn’t happen because of the Internet, or cable, or whatever. And as long as there is a need for people to feel as if they are part of something larger than themselves (which would be: always) there will be mass culture – or mass cultures, I should say.
A few further thoughts on the handmade world, following last week’s Consumed on the DIY thing. The most interesting response came from my friend Wendy, who said that in the course of some research she’d done on luxury consumers, handmade-ness was often something people cited as a marker of luxury.
That makes sense, although of course I hadn’t really thought of it in connection with DIYism. It reminded me of one of my pet theories, though, which has nothing to do with any of this.
I’m not a drinker of elaborate coffees, but I’m often stuck in line behind such people while waiting to order a cup of regular, black coffee. In those moments of boredom, I’ve concluded that forcing some kid to run around fidding with the espresso machines and whipping this or sprinkling on that is actually part of the appeal of the fancy coffee drink: It’s being handmade, right in front of you. I wonder if, say, Starbucks had located its mocha-whatever manufacturing zone out of sight, and you couldn’t watch the stuff being prepared, if it would have the same appeal. Or if you just ordered it and they handed it to you immediately. It wouldn’t be as good, right? It seems better simply because you’ve watched somebody hustle around constructing it.
Just a thought.
In the blog world, other reactions to that column included a post on Vertical Weblog offering some Devil’s advocate thoughts on the hipness factor of crafting; general crafter support; the small business angle; and a DaddyTypes post suggesting that perhaps the DIY “revolution” is led not by women, but by parents. On the other hand, maybe this column was another example of my “Productivist Bias.”
In Consumed: Hershey’s Cherry Cordial Kiss Limited Edition: How “limited edition” candy went from novelty to glut.
Consumers crave two things: familiarity and novelty. This, of course, presents a challenge to sellers and helps explain why there are so many varieties of toothpaste, soft drinks, detergent or cereal anchored to a handful of famous brand names. The giants of the candy industry have wrestled with this predicament over the past few years, responding with a strategy that one-ups so-called brand extension: the limited edition. . . . Continue reading at the NYT Mag site via this no-registration-required link.
Related Links: Candyblog; Candy Addict; Limited Edition Candy Flickr set.
From an interesting Wall Street Journal story about locating “call centers” in other countries, but making sure the workers there are up on U.S. pop culture:
With more U.S. businesses opening call centers overseas, executives want reassurance that foreign employees will thrive under U.S. managers — and more importantly, get along with demanding U.S. customers. For these companies, cultural compatibility has become as important as labor availability and tax incentives….
A decade ago, big U.S. companies started hiring staff in low-wage countries like India to perform back-office work and clerical tasks. While India, with its highly educated, English-speaking work force, still attracts most of the call-center business, countries like the Philippines, Mexico, Canada and Ireland increasingly are destinations of choice for jobs that require customer contact, such as product support, hotel reservations and bill collection. For executives, matching a country with certain jobs has become a crucial task.
For some call-center companies, the perfect match means an in-depth knowledge of American popular culture. “I’m looking for people who already know that Barbie’s boyfriend is Ken,” [a call-center company exec] says….
From this article, written for the Detroit Free Press and reprinted in the Seattle Times, I learned of Church Marketing Sucks. That site turns out to be a project of a bunch of church marketers, who I guess are trying to shake things up. “We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening,” one of these people is quoted saying. “We think the church has a communications problem. In general, the church has been resistant to the idea of church marketing.” The article says: “Some marketing-savvy Christians believe higher powers need help getting good word-of-mouth.”
This isn’t quite so new as the article implies. There’s a good book called Selling God that lays out the rather long history of the way church culture and pop culture have interacted since the 1800s. Maybe I’ll say more about that some other time, but here’s a relevant quote from that book: “If religion is to be culturally central, it must learn to work with other things that are also central. Previously that might have been feudalism, kings, or Platonic philosophy. More recently it has been market capitalism responsive to consumers with spare time and a bit of money to spend.”
Still, there’s something jarring about religious marketers playing the ‘tude card with a “your strategy sucks” approach. More interesting is that this comes at a time when quasi-religious metaphors (brand “cults,” brand “evangalists,” etc) have become incredibly commonplace is marketing-talk. The book Pyro Marketing baldly suggests that the same tactics that made Purpose-Driven Life and Passion of the Christ into hits can work for any old brand at all.
This article from the Journal of Religion and Popular Culture (Volume XII: Spring 2006) reports on the results of a survey designed to explore similarities and differences among types of secular fans, different groups of religious believers, and, finally, between secular fans and the religiously devout in general. The secular fan categories were music, media, and sports. I don’t think this should be surprising, but maybe it is: The study concluded that there are differences between the religious and secular devotion. (It also found that the answers of the secular fans were similar across different categories of fandom.)
For example, in discussing how they came to their specific devotion (“the indoctrinating medium”), the religious respondents cited parents or other family members, while the secular respondents point to media. Also: “Religious respondents stated that they believed other people viewed their interest in religion to be positive, while the secular group thought others viewed their interest as either neutral or negative.” Religious devotees said “they would pray [for] or love” critics of their devotion. Secular fans said they would “ignore” critics of theirs.
Finally, religious people apparently described the degree of their devotion by how much they would give up for their beliefs — right up to giving their lives, for instance. The secular fans described their degree of devotion by “the amount of time they have spent on their given interest.”
Presumably this is one of the things that makes secular fandom so appealing: You get feelings of community and being part of something bigger than yourself and so on, but you don’t have to sacrifice anything, really. And the more time you spend enjoying whatever it is you’re a fan of — well, that just proves the depth of your commitment.
I’ve been wondering why there has not been been, to my knowledge, any particular backlash from religious believers about the ways in which the commercial, secular-fandom world hijacks their language. But maybe the answer is that religious marketers are too busy hijacking right back.
An image from the Adbusters pool.
A quick follow-up about my adventures with phone service. You may recall I complained about (or rather to) Vonage, but then later admitted that I decided to stick with them anyway. (I’ll still waiting, by the way, for some hard evidence of bad customer service resulting in negative word of mouth that a serious material impact on a company or brand. Anybody?)
Anyway, here’s the end of my relationship with Verizon:
Dear Verizon, I thought someone there might be interested in knowing why I recently terminated my account.
Please continue…
Today in Consumed: My Paper Crane: A wave of indie entrepreneurs who see DIYism as an ethic, not an aesthetic.
Heidi Kenney is a married mother of two, and she likes to sew and make things. The fact that these things include dolls in the shape of giant tampons is perhaps the first clue that she is not exactly a housewife in the 1950’s-sitcom mold. Kenney, who is 28 and lives outside Baltimore, makes and sells a variety of stuffed, anthropomorphized objects — the tampon dolls are among her best sellers — like doughnuts, toast and toilet-paper rolls. She does this under the auspices of her one-woman brand, My Paper Crane, making her part of a wave of independent businesses selling handmade toys, clothing, soap, jewelry, housewares and other items.
Do-it-yourself products are now at the center of everything from the DIY Network on cable television to Craft magazine, due out in the fall. All of this raises the question of what D.I.Y.-ism is really all about — is it an ethic or just an aesthetic? While the phenomenon may be on the brink of producing a few craft-world celebrities — the stars of “Stylelicious” on DIY, for example — stories like Kenney’s open a window on a sprawling community of small entrepreneurs and consumers, which seems to have a completely different set of goals. . . . Continue reading at the NYT Magazine site via this no-registration-required link.
A Few Related Links: My Paper Crane; Indie Craft Documentary; Craftster; Craftivism; Craft Revolution; Craft stuff on Make blog; Craft Mag Flickr group; Etsy online craft store; Fred Flare online store. There are many, many craft-related sites directly tied in to this scene or movement or whatever you care to call it, so I’m sure I’m leaving out important things, but this is a start…
One way to look at getting made fun of on television is that you’ve really made it. Nobody parodies a politician or a celebrity or a brand unless the parody victim is a big enough deal for the audience to get the joke. So I guess it makes sense, in a sad way, that companies are now paying to be mocked.
Brandweek (June 26) says Toyota paid MADtv to make fun of a new car it has out called the Yaris. Boost Mobile paid to be made fun of on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. “There’s no better way to say ‘you’re it’ than to have people parody you,” a Boost marketer explains.
I guess that’s true even if you’re not actually “it,” but have just written someone a check to do something that makes you seem as though you’re “it.” In this case the something just happens to be trashing your product, in a humorous and edgy manner.
Edgy is important of course because the target here is the youth audience. Another marketer delivers the quote that I’ve read a million times and that’s mandatory in all stories about youth-focused marketing: “You need to be authentic with this demographic. They have a savvy that wasn’t there before, and they know when they’re being sold to.”
Sure, paying to be a punchline, that’s a really authentic thing to do.
The irony of MADtv being part of all this is that, of course, the original Mad Magazine routinely offered wicked parodies of advertising to its youthful audience, which was apparently savvy enough to laugh. Those may have been more innocent times — but it certainly wasn’t because marketers were more phony back then than they are today.
From a Flickr pool called “Converse World Domination!” The explanation: “all stars, one stars–it doesn’t matter! c’mon, honey! show us your chucks! Note: Members can post 50 photos to the pool each month.” So far, 1,733 photos from 631 members. Also in the Flickr pools “An IPOD World,” with 120 members contributing 334 photos, and “Converse All Star,” with 138 members, 458 photos.
Posted Under:
Flickr Artifacts by Rob Walker on July 1, 2006
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